Humanoid

I'm more curious whether the nature of Sony's surprise was: a) Awesome, with this we've unlocked the key to harnessing the full power of Cell! We can now cancel the PS4 project immediately; or b) Never ever ever EVER do that again. We must never again speak of this, lest you find a horse's head in your bed in the morning.

Goal reached, and more importantly, a boxed copy is a thing now, yays.

Joe Dolce's Shaddap You Face is to Ultravox's Vienna as that flood is to the city of Vienna.

Easy money: sell DLC that does nothing other than removing the boss fights.

I really struggled with a rogue in MoTB, but with SoZ, eh, it's hard to go wrong with four characters of your design unless you go really exotic.

Definitely feeling the first half of the game is stronger, and by a good margin too. The game has the same XCOM inverse difficulty curve going on, and by the end it's mechanically going through the motions. The plot interactions also feel a fair bit sparser in Mexico, where I could go for weeks at a time essentially doing nothing and not interacting with any of my crew. I guess the main complaint I can make mechanically is that the character level progression is pretty flat. The passive feats are mostly barely noticable, things such as +5 defense or +10% damage when flanking are, while not terrible, not particularly interesting either. The active abilities are also a bit inconsistent, some I can barely see much use for (such as the veteran scout's throwing knife and the soldier's active defensive skills since hp pools are so small compared to damage that attacking is almost always the better option), and there's no choice at all about them. I didn't start out meaning to keep comparing this to XCOM, but despite that game's missteps with some of them, most of the character levelling choices were genuine "interesting decisions" in Sid-speak, where the choices were both significant in impact and had a real effect on how the game was played depending on which choice was taken. In E:C it's mainly just a case of upgrading all your recruits to veteran so that each has +10% attack and defense, a couple of minor passive skills, plus another potential 5% attack/defense from extra equipment slots that open up. Not a fatal flaw by any means, but while I'll certainly replay the game at least once more, it's only for the RP aspects and not any significantly differing mechanical approach. The other issue I'm having is that it's incredibly hard so far to justify investing in ranged combat to any significant degree. Finding typically that it requires 2-3 hits of melee to get a kill, as opposed to 4-5 for ranged, and that's before accounting for the guaranteed damage versus gambling with chance to hit. Further, it seems while all but the scout get to wield ranged damage, the hit chances for anyone but hunters are so absurdly low (30% in broad daylight while a few tiles away?) that it's the last resort of the desperate rather than a meaningful option. And yes, I'm comparing characters with equivalent (maxed out) equipment in their relevant weapon category.

No real idea what Steam's policy on that kind of thing is, specifically whether it'd cost the devs money equivalent to Steam's cut. I have no reason to ask for a Steam key so I won't bother. Anyway, I think my first run is almost done - explored about 80% of the Mexico map so far so unless there's a big twist and more opens up, I assume it's just a bit of running around finishing the final plot quests. Not quite 20 hours played at best guess, so it'd be a bit over 20 by the time I'm done I'd say.

CD editions often brought Redbook CD audio separate from the data track, so I'm happy to have it.

It kind of misses the point - they've brought back the start *button* but not the start menu. ...I'll wait for Windows 8.11 for Workgroups.

Didn't touch the difficulty settings, so it's on normal with all the defaults.

Playing it in windowed mode to get rid of the map bug, but will now have to get used to arrow-key/WASD scrolling instead of edge scroll. A question - the New Game dialogue implies that I can start a new game in Mexico, but the option is locked. My first game is already in Mexico, which I thought would be the trigger, but apparently not. Do I have to finish the whole game first? Not a bug but an AI foible - it seems it's willing to run through any number of attacks of opportunity to get to your hunter. More than a few times I've gotten kills on full HP enemies this way.

Can't think of all that many really. Privateer, Ultima 7/8, HoMM3, maybe MOO2. Even then it's usually not for extended stints, a few days is enough to satisfy the itch. I did spend almost $100 on a new joystick for Privateer as recently as 2011 so I guess that takes the cake. Civ4 is probably too recent to say I "go back" to it.

Ah, I couldn't overcome my RPG hoarding instincts so I haven't used a single consumable throughout.... EDIT: Confirmed the world map position bug is global to anyone playing a 25x14/16 resolution. Either have to lower my res or wait for the patch to resolve it (if it does).

Aaand, it's here. No surprises really.

Hardest for me was a random encounter with some rebels on a camp event, which like the penultimate battle on the island was one of those "hold out for 10 turns" fights - but which I didn't win. Mainly because one was fought with half recruits and the other with full veterans.... Had to spend all my resources on medicine after that one. Also still toughing it out with ironman, but I did savescum with alt-f4 once when I unintentionally started a fight via dialogue.

Answering myself, yeah, it's just for scouting. Another bug I've hit - landed in Mexico and the world map isn't centred correctly, it's centred around the top-centre of the screen such that I can only see the lower half of it. But yeah, hit Mexico and decided to call it a night. Or a morning - it was 8am and I'd been playing since 10pm. What's working for me at the moment is a party of 2 doctors, 3 hunters, 1 scholar (can't see there ever being a need for a second one), 2 scouts and 2 soldiers (plus the freebie one). My combat team however is just doctor, hunter, and two each of scout and soldier - had a real hard time getting even one hunter to pull their weight, ranged combat in general feels incredibly underpowered currently. Even the token hunter I take into combat is really just a mop-up guy - finish off low-hp enemies from range so that my melee troops can do some real damage on meaningful targets. In hindsight I might have swapped a hunter for a backup scout in the larger party. The hunters are there to hunt (surprise), but are otherwise kind of dead weight. It'd be a bit of a point sink that way however - I only truly felt self-sufficient once I had four guys with 8+ hunting (the three hunters plus one of the doctors at the moment). Oh, took the freebie shaman purely to process the massive backlog of herbs.

Guess I'll just keep fooling around with low-investment saves until then - just finally ended my first game when, after surviving for weeks with one single party member, he was kidnapped by a random event and that was that, game over cinematic. Just as well, I was determined to fight to the bitter end, and probably would have unwisely wasted hours on hours trying to rebuild if not for that. Resulted in a secondary bug - since no one healthy was left to talk to me, one of my dead party members started the conversation about the quest that just triggered. Alas, they stayed dead after that dialogue. Bug with all stats or just scouting? EDIT: Load times are pretty long for a game of this type, going to move it onto the SSD too.

VR technology with be driven not by games, but by, ahem, ...adult entertainment.

How did you do for food? With only three soldiers I had some trouble with theft, but sending everyone else out hunting except for a scout patrolling, at least a lot of the time I can mostly eat what we hunt. Also started tinkering. Upgraded my carts twice and my tools once and am now constructing more barricades. Two man-at-arm hunters with 9 hunting skill, and also put my doctor as 5 in hunting was just about self sufficient.

Playing on normal ironman, I've comprehensively failed in my first attempt. I have one guy left, at -4 morale, the others all either died or mutinied. I'm totally going to play it to the bitter end though!

My scouting skill for some reason has been set back to 5 from an initial value of 8. I'm sure it was correct at the start of the game since now I'm 3 points short of the 38-point total. Not sure if there's some sort of 'feature' that munched those points or if it's a straight bug.

Actually I have had one night-time minor random event so far which seemed to be based on the background. I am making a fairly wild assumption here, but it seems you have a chance to unlock discussions in camp with your followers about their motivation to join you. At least one of my scholars and I had a very interesting chat. Also, the leadership skill does get a boost from followers later on, but never as much as the other skills. Leadership does not get a boost by class, but by follower rank. As you can have a max of two sergeants and one lieutenant, it seems that you can get a bonus from three followers. It also remains to be seen what the native only class "shaman" works out as. Probably the same as the spaniard only "scholar" with slightly different combat abilities. I would assume that extra soldiers are especially usefull if you are aiming for an aggressive playthrough, even though soldiers may be cautious, peacefull altruists. I went for one of each so that even if someone falls ill, gets kidnapped or whatever, I still have a spare. Somewhat misleadingly though, soldiers aren't necessarily the best combatants. Scouts are better at melee combat and hunters are better at ranged combat, making the soldier more of a generalist than anything. You'll still want at least a couple, but that's more for guard duty when camping rather than for the combat subsystem - beyond that it's a matter of preferred playstyle.

Played a bit more, with some positive and negatives: + Looks like party composition is pretty flexible, I haven't come across a situation yet where I'd tell myself "man, I really should have taken one more of this class instead of that one." Except maybe I should have taken a third hunter instead of a fourth soldier, especially as you get one extra NPC soldier right at the start of the game. I also observe that the player character counts as a doctor for the purposes of treating the injured, so there's less need to specifically recruit a backup doctor. + Combat with six actors on your side seems about the right size. Then again it's probably just habit from it being a de-facto standard for modern RPGs and tactical squad games. + I like the abstraction of equipment. There's no actual gear as such, just "equipment points" which you distribute individually amongst your crew. e.g. I have 10 EP - I give 3 points into 'ranged' for my hunter who I trust to remain safe at the back, 2 points of 'melee' and 2 points of 'armour' to my soldier who needs enough grunt to stay alive on the front, and 3 points of 'armour' to my doctor who needs to stay alive at all costs. + Experience behaves similarly, you gain a pool of experience for your party which isn't a static counter - it's a partywide resource you expend to level up your NPCs, and you can distribute the levels however you please. If you have 400xp for example, you could level up any four of your recruits to level 2 (100xp each), or level one recruit to level 3 (100 then 300xp) No having to make your doctor deliver killing blows or the like to farm XP for them, nor having to split your XP amongst a dozen people when you only ever really use half of them. It took me a while to catch on to the system however, I was walking around with a bunch of level ones for a good while, fighting level two opponents. - Map navigation tends to be hindered by a lot of solid obstacles. There are a lot of jungle tiles for example, which just serve as solid walls forcing you to go around - cutting through them is certainly not an option. So there's a bit less freedom of movement than there might seem to be at first. - The zoom level, fully zoomed out, is a bit closer than I'd like. I assume it's a conscious design decision to create a bit of a 'lost in the jungle' feel, but it still feels a bit uncomfortable. - On multiple screens, the camera edge-scrolling doesn't work on the side with the extended desktop, your mouse scrolls out of the game instead of being bounded by the game window, making the scrolling impractical. - The camp UI is annoyingly and unnecessarily compacted. It's a tiny window in the middle of the screen with four tabs to assign various things. Surely they could have just made a full-screen UI and displayed all useful information and controls at once? It's probably my biggest annoyance with the game currently given how often you have to use this panel.

I don't like grid inventories because to me it feels like oversimulation. Sure, it's a neat system for visually depicting the bulk of an item, but my feeling is, why should I care about the bulk of an item? What does it add to the gameplay?

Due this week, heh. (Called "Legendary edition")